Governor General's Award and Scotiabank Giller Prize winner Madeleine Thien is back with new novel
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Vancouver native Madeleine Thien will be marking the publication of her latest novel The Book of Records, out May 6, with a special Vancouver Writers Fest event on May 8.
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Thien, whose book Do Not Say We Have Nothing won the Governor General's Award for English-language fiction, the Scotiabank Giller Prize and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, will take to the Annex stage (823 Seymour St.) for a conversation with Vancouver author David Chariandy.
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Answer: The Book of Records is set in a building made of time. It is about the ideas that transform us, the lives we imagine for ourselves and others, and the hopes we carry. It is about a father who knows that his time is limited, and who wants to give his daughter an inner world that will sustain her after he is gone.
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A: In fact, The Sea is not a migrant camp or a detention centre. It's an abandoned enclave that, physically, echoes the now demolished Kowloon Walled City. People who have been displaced by war, by the rising sea, by conflict, by dwindling resources, pass through it; The Sea is just one stop on their search for home. Only a very few remain there, often because something prevents them from moving on.
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A: My novel — which, I think it's fair to say, is a strange work — is itself, metaphorically, a building, a place that shelters different philosophies across time; it houses people who are grappling with questions about free will, ethics, and what it means to live a good life. In The Sea, ideas migrate, take on new life, are misunderstood, revised, and sometimes reimagined in the hope that they might guide us when all else seems lost.
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Of course, ideas are not made of air. They are carried by human beings across space and time, across borders. My heart breaks because I do not know a time when migration, displacement, homelessness, and the search for safety were not part of our world.
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A: I think I keep returning to the force of history and the significance of individual lives. Perhaps The Book of Records continues an exploration of collaboration, collusion and silence, but also the loyalties of friendship; in this novel, more than the others, there's an exploration of namelessness, and what it means to save another person, especially someone with whom we have no ties of kinship, family or national identity.
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Cision Canada
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Winnipeg Free Press
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For Ana de Armas, Keanu Reeves' co-star 10 years ago and once again, ‘Ballerina' is a pirouette
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Cision Canada
2 days ago
- Cision Canada
QUEBECOR FUND ANNOUNCES FUNDING FOR PRODUCERS UNDER ITS TELEVISION PRODUCTION SUPPORT PROGRAMS Français
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